Re: *at syscalls for xattrs?

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Jeff Garzik wrote:
>>> What the *at() interfaces really do is fix/paper over a longstanding
>>> wart in Unix: the cwd really should have been a standard file descriptor
>>> (like stdin/stdout/stderr) instead of a magic piece of state maintained
>>> in kernel space.
>> It's more than a wart, IMO.  *at() allows one to close races (with
>> potential security implications) that are otherwise impossible to close,
>> in directory traversal.
>>
>> *at() permits a userspace program to hold proper references to all
>> objects during a directory traversal, with all that implies.
>>
> 
> Well, as Jeremy pointed out, in the absence of threads you can do the
> same thing with fchdir(), however, that's much more of a hack.

My posixutils project (coreutils replacement) used fchdir(2), but that 
still doesn't get you 100% race-free.  It gets you close, yes.

	Jeff